Indigenous and raced: Nitasha Tamar Sharma, ‘Race and Indigeneity in Pacific Islands and Settler Colonial Studies’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 7, 2, 2021 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous and raced: Nitasha Tamar Sharma, ‘Race and Indigeneity in Pacific Islands and Settler Colonial Studies’, Critical Ethnic Studies, 7, 2, 2021

18Dec25

Excerpt: Eiichiro Azuma and Greg Dvorak gift us with two important and richly researched books that deepen our understanding of how settler colonialism operates as a connective mechanism tying Japanese and US imperialisms. My response applies a concept from one study to the other; both questions stem from my interest in Blackness and the African diaspora in the Pacific, or the Black Pacific. Eiichiro: how would a focus on indigeneity, including Indigenous voices and lives—a particular strength of Dvorak’s Coral and Concrete: Remembering Kwajalein Atoll between Japan, America, and the Marshall Islands—illuminate the effects of your articulation of “adaptive settler colonialism?” Greg: How would a more encompassing analysis of race, highlighted in Azuma’s In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire, expand our understanding of the Marshallese and their experiences in and beyond Micronesia? Both books engage the interactive, overlapping, and distinct imperial interests and settler practices of Japan and the United States. They detail the diversity within and hierarchies among racialized, national, and Indigenous populations. Azuma and Dvorak theorize how global processes and individual actors come together to reveal the mechanics of domination, displacement, and resistance. Azuma offers a top-down approach in his study of Japan’s uneven success in implementing imperial ambitions though their settlements of “new Japans” in regions spanning North and South America, the Pacifc, and other parts of Asia. Dvorak pins his attention to Kwajalein, a main islet of the Marshall Islands in the Micronesian region of the Pacifc, to show how its people, reef, land, and missile-illuminated skies have been cumulatively affected by Japanese, US, and Marshallese exchanges.

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